Recipe #2

Wow, all the way up to my second recipe. How exciting.

Okay, this is something that I discovered as I opened up my vegetable drawer and found two lonesome red beets. They weren't the hard as a rock kind of beets that I'm used to dealing with (and roasting to great effect), but rather, they had been hiding out in the back of the drawer for a week or two and had developed a bit of softness. This, I suppose, is the key. They were as soft as some potatoes I found lurking in there as well. Add an onion, some pepper, coriander or whatever other spices you'd like (a little rosemary might've been interesting) and you're on your way to making what I'd like to call "Bloody Hash Browns." Basically, chop the beet into smallish chunks and follow by cutting up 2 potatoes of roughly equivalent size to match. Add half the onion (or a whole small one), diced slightly finer than the potatoes. Put a tablespoon of canola or olive oil in a pan and set it to high. Throw in the beets. Add the potatoes. Toss in the onion. Stir to keep from sticking too much. Cover. Stir every 2 or 3 minutes to keep the oil circulated and the various parts of it "browning" properly. Takes about 10 minutes. Add the seasonings and that's about it. The beets add a nice earthy taste to the sweetness of the onion and the relative flavorlessness of the potato. And all of the pieces get that lovely blood red hue from the beet as it meshes with everything, so it looks, well, bloody.

Okay, so it's not haute cuisine. But it could serve as a nice base to put a piece of fish on or something else. I dunno. Go wild. Or ignore this recipe. I can't always have a great cycling adventure -- it was raining like crazy tonight.